PHAI has always sought to use legal and policy thinking to advance the primary aims of tobacco control: reducing the disease and death caused by tobacco industry products.
Endgame:
When we first began working on tobacco control issues (at which time we were known as “anti-tobacco activists”), the notion that there was a possibility of an endgame or means to eliminate the health threat posed by cigarettes and other tobacco products seemed far fetched. But after decades of piecemeal gains, the time for bolder thinking is here.
In March of 2013, Northeastern Univeristy Distinguished Professor of Law (and our president) Dick Daynard articulated a 2-pronged endgame strategy for the U.S.
Also see these two articles by Dick Daynard from Tobacco Control: an International Journal: How Smoking Became History: Looking back to 2012 and Doing the Unthinkable (and saving millions of lives) (abstract only).
Previously, we produced a working paper on FDA’s authority to reduce nicotine in cigarettes.
Human Rights-Based Approaches:
One area of innovation has been to pursue a human rights-based approach to tobacco control around the world. We have initiated connections between human rights and tobacco control forces in 20 countries.
See our advocacy brief on Allying Tobacco Control and Human Rights (commentary based on this work appeared in Tobacco Control: an International Journal, ) and our earlier but more detailed project report on International Tobacco Control: Human Rights-Based Approaches.
Tobacco Company Shareholder Meetings:
For many years, TPLP Senior Attorney Ed Sweda has held shares of Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds stock in order to confront their CEOs at shareholder meetings with important questions for shareholders to consider. For the past several years, he has reported on these shareholder meetings and his activities.
Disability Law and the Rights of Non-Smokers:
Back in 1993, we published the first article (reproduced by GASP-Colorado) about applying the Americans with Disabilities Act so as to address smokey workplaces and public spaces that exclude people with disabilities related to tobacco smoke.
Daynard, along with Northeastern University Matthews Distinguished professor Wendy Parmet and PHAI Executive Director Mark Gottlieb wrote an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1996 titled: The Physician’s Role in Helping Smoke-Sensitive Patients to Use the Americans With Disabilities Act to Secure Smoke-Free Workplaces and Public spaces (PDF from Philip Morris’s internal documents).
Another article by these authors was produced for a legal audience in the Clevelend-Marshall College of Law Journal of Law & Health titled: Accomodating Vulnerabilities to Environmental Tobacco Smoke: A Prism for Understanding the ADA.